FreeBSD 10.0 Beta 2 Shows Much Needed Stability

A new development version for the FreeBSD 10.0 branch has been released

FreeBSD 10.0 Beta 2, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, has been released and it's now available for download and testing.

The FreeBSD developers have been doing a great job, and the final version of their operating system can't be very far, especially after six development versions.

The developers have also advised the users that, on systems running FreeBSD 10.0 BETA1 (and only systems running 10.0-BETA1), they have to run the following command before using freebsd-update:

sed -i '' -e 's/%@/%~@/' /usr/sbin/freebsd-update

Also, according to the developers, the ports.txz distribution hasn't been included in the 10.0 Beta 2 release. However, it is expected to be included with disc1.iso for subsequent builds during the release cycle.

Highlights of FreeBSD 10.0 Beta 2:

• The AHCI ATAPI emulation is now working correctly when backed with /dev/cd0 in virtio;

• The XHCI stability has been improved;

• The latest version of mtree has been upgraded from NetBSD;

• The automatic creation of a certificate for sendmail has been enabled;

• Support has been added for "first boot" rc.d scripts;

• A bug which prevented jails from starting when $jail_conf was used and no jail name was specified has been fixed;

• The Xen userland event channel driver, which is not yet ready, has been disabled;

• The T4 and T5 firmwares have been disabled.

Users have been encouraged to test the distribution and report any problems they find. Also, the users who are employing the ZFS installation option and have enabled full-disk encryption will have manually add a few entries to loader.conf before the “bootpool” zpool.